Mar 2, 2010
Patrick Klepek, a reporter for G4TV’s “The Feed” posted a report just under two hours ago regarding some kind of incident going on at Infinity Ward.
Reportedly, a source from the development studio has informed him that a “bunch of bouncer-types” arrived outside the studio offices unannounced, and are unwilling to disclose the reason for their presence. Meanwhile, studio heads Vince Zampella and Jason West had a publisher meeting with Activision this morning, and haven’t been seen since.
Activision has been contacted for comment on the situation, more on this story as it develops.
Update: Modern Warfare 2 game director and Inifnity Ward president Jason West’s Facebook page and LinkedIn profile both indicate that he is no longer working at Infinity Ward, as of March 2010. It’s no secret that Activision has no compunctions against slamming their owned studios, but it’s a surprising move with Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare games bringing the value of the Call of Duty series into the billions.
Update 2: Earlier today (Monday) Activision made an SEC filing citing a human resources investigation into “breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees” at Infinity Ward.
“The matter is expected to involve the departure of key personnel and litigation,” read Activision’s filing. “At present, the Company does not expect this matter to have a material impact on the Company.”
At present, it seems like those two employees might well have been Jason West and Vince Zampella.
[Source] G4TV
Let me guess: Activision fires IW leads because they refuse to give them creative freedom (instead forcing them to do MW every year for the next 435 years). Other IW people upset, leave. Everyone forms a brand new studio with basically the same people with every other publisher ready to throw money at anything they want to make. Activision continues to pimp out CoD every year with different developers, but quality lags and eventually that well runs dry. IW creates a new IP and rakes in the cash with their new publisher.
It's like the whole Medal of Honor thing all over again!
What a weird 24 hours. PS3s temporarily bricked, IW heads gone, Valve's bizarre viral Portal stunt...
There's unconfirmed reports that top IW people are due some very big royalty checks at the end of the fiscal year... if they're still with the company. Sounds like they're trying to fire people with cause over nitpicky things.
Fuck Activision extra hard if that's true.
They should jump on board something else, say maybe the team that's doing MAG, or I had heard Medal of Honour might come back (who owns that one?) and just leave COD to dry up.
Hell it would be great if most of Infinity Ward left Activision and they made their own new company. They would get picked up by another publisher ASAP.
Hell it would be great if most of Infinity Ward left Activision and they made their own new company. They would get picked up by another publisher ASAP.
Man I'm hoping for mass resignations. A good developer out of Activision's iron grasp can only be a good thing.
Monday certainly was a strange day in the videogame world. That's for sure.
To be honest I am just uber-surprised that Activision had the balls to fire the top men at IW. I mean the game WAS the most sucessful title out last year - sure those guys had been speaking out against Activision, but it was nothing too inflamatory - just comments about how the higher ups didn't even want a Modern wargame but wanted to stick with WW2.
The brass at Activision HAS to realize that this will lead to a ton of employees quitting. Sure they may be employed by Activision, but they really worked for those guys that just got shit-canned.
Pug, I'm not surprised. As far as Activision is concerned, developers are worthless - it's the IPs that are worth everything. After all IW had nothing to do with World at War and that sucker sold millions. And what was the first thing Activision did after they bought Guitar Hero? Gave Harmonix the boot and gave the franchise to an inexperienced studio, then had about 17 developers make 348 GH games within three years. Kotick will probably think good riddance if all of IW gets up and leaves since he still owns the CoD IP.
Yeah I understand all that. You'd just think that Activision would have seen all the shit EA went through when they did the same thing and how they suffered then - MAYBE Activision would have learned the lesson via proxy. Apparently not.
I just think its hilarious how EA and Activision have just completely swapped places in the last few years in terms of customer quality and appreciation.
activision obviously has gotten too big for its own good. running music games into the ground and abusing call of duty until it, too, gives up the ghost may make short-term sense, but as a long-terms trategy it's absolutely fahrbot. good luck with that, guys.
Some sites are reporting that IW hasn't seen a penny of the $1b that MW2 made (seems IW has partial ownership - likely residual - of the CoD franchise, and Eurogamer mentions that their contractual obligations to Activision ends in October - weird as I thought they were fully owned but whatever). Sounds like they were fired for having secret negotiations with other publishers, likely due to the fact that Activision is dicking them out of royalty payments. So it sounds like the team was considering reforming to make new games elsewhere instead of being CoD slaves, so this may just accelerate things.